Motorola has warned that continuing hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon may disrupt its business. The US phone giant could be especially affected by the ongoing conflict because it has sizeable manufacturing and engineering operations in Israel. It has about 3,500 employees in Israel, including its Israeli headquarters in Tel Aviv, the country's largest city. Motorola added that the conflict could also hit its sales across the region. "We also sell our products and services throughout the Middle East and demand for our products and services could be negatively impacted by the hostilities," the firm said. ... http://news.bbc.co.uk

Vicars in the UK are up in arms after parts of a program they use to organise church services were branded spyware. Many users of the Visual Liturgy software rendered the program useless after deleting a file wrongly identified as spyware. The creators of Visual Liturgy criticised anti-virus firm Symantec for the time it took to fix the bug. Symantec said the mistake had been fixed and users could avoid the problem by updating their anti-virus software. The row between Symantec and Church House Publishing, the creator of Visual Liturgy, blew up on 8 July following an update to the Norton anti-virus software. More than 4,500 Church of England parishes rely on Visual Liturgy to help them plan and prepare church services. The update identified a file called vlutils.dll as being part of a keylogging program called SniperSpy. In fact the file was an integral part of Visual Liturgy. Many people who reacted to the warning by deleting the files crippled the program. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5244988.stm

The European Commission is considering action against Eritrea in protest at food aid being sold, and the proceeds used for government work programmes. Eritrea may be asked to repay the $3m cost of food thought to have been sold. The EC's ambassador to Eritrea, Geert Heikens, told the BBC that attempts to discuss the matter with the authorities had failed, and that action was needed. The row comes at a time when more than 15% of Eritreans are malnourished and the country depends on outside aid. The Eritrean government introduced a new policy of cash-for-work in May, saying this was to prevent the population becoming dependent on outside aid. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5245998.stm

A pair of strange new worlds that blur the boundaries between planets and stars have been discovered beyond our Solar System. A few dozen such objects have been identified in recent years but this is the first set of "twins". Dubbed "planemos", they circle each other rather than orbiting a star. Their existence challenges current theories about the formation of planets and stars, astronomers report in the journal Science. "This is a truly remarkable pair of twins - each having only about 1% the mass of our Sun," said Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, co-author of the Science paper. "Its mere existence is a surprise, and its origin and fate a bit of a mystery." ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5241774.stm

Far from unifying the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo, Sunday's historic elections have highlighted the deep division between the east and west of the vast former Belgian colony. The July 30th polls were meant to heal wounds after a brutal 1998-2003 war which tore apart Congo's aging infrastructure and killed four million people, mostly from hunger and disease. Results are still weeks away but indicators point to a landslide victory for President Joseph Kabila in his native Swahili-speaking east while former rebel and Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba is ahead in the west, where Lingala is spoken. "The DR Congo Cut In Two" read a headline in Le Phare, a Kinshasa daily. ...http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2274008

Thousands of civilians fled Sri Lanka's eastern battle zone by tractor and on foot on Friday as shells fell nearby during an artillery battle between Tamil Tiger rebels and the army, survivors said. Small pockets of rebels continued firefights with troops in the eastern Muslim town of Mutur, where aid workers say between 20,000-30,000 people were trapped by the fighting before they headed south in search of safety. Tamil Tigers also attacked army camps, while the Army said it killed dozens of rebels as Norway's peace envoy flew in to discuss the future of Nordic truce monitors as the island slides back to civil war. "We left everything behind — our wealth, our belongings. We have to be somewhere safe," said 24-year-old shop owner S.M. Ramees, arriving with thousands of fellow displaced at the town of Palathoppur south of Mutur. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2274002